The Shadowrun Sixth World Beginner Box due for release at Origins this June will be our first look at the new edition of the now 30-year-old Shadowrun game system. This new edition promises to be a more streamlined experience for new players while still satisfying veterans, but does it live up to that promise?

To start with, let’s take a look at what you get. The retail price for the boxed set is $24.99 and I think it’s worth it. I’ve done an unboxing video on my YouTube channel if you want to know what the components look like.

The two rulebooks – the Quick Start Rulebook and the included adventure “Battle Royale” – are very nice quality. The pages are thick and glossy, the cardstock covers are sturdy, and the binding tight so it won’t fall apart if you look at it funny. The character dossiers won’t really work as character sheets on their own because they’re also on the thick, glossy paper which means they can’t be written on by anything other than a felt-tip pen or a marker, but they are good for references for each of the characters.

The deck of reference cards are a bit smaller than standard poker size, but are incredibly thick stock with a strong coating, meaning they’re unlikely to bend and may be resistant to modest liquid spills (but don’t hold me to that). The dice are the same style as Catalyst has sold for years. They fall into that category of dice that look awesome but aren’t quite as readable as standard dice for playing. The purple-on-black design makes these about a 7/10 on the readability scale. There are also 12 dice included which is enough for the Beginner Box characters if the group passes them around, but you’re going to want more dice (particularly for the Face pregen who has a dice pool of 14 for some skills). There’s also a giant poster map, one side featuring the two locations from the adventure and the other side a map of Seattle, the game’s default setting. I want to get the Seattle side framed.

The rules themselves are, in fact, streamlined from previous editions. In fact, the Quick Start rules are only 24 pages long and well-organized by section so you’re not flipping around too much the first time you’re reading through trying to figure out stuff. A good deal of the crunchy mechanical nature of Shadowrun has been shifted to the new Edge System, which I’ll go into later. But first, I want to talk about what hasn’t changed.

Characters have eight main attributes and two to three special attributes. The main attributes are Body, Agility, Reaction, Strength, Willpower, Logic, Intuition, and Charisma. Every character has the special attributes Essence and Edge, while magically-active characters will also have Magic (for Shadowrun fans, the Quick Start doesn’t make any mention of technomancers at all). Attribute ratings typically range from 1-6, though the pregens include one character with a 7 and another with an 8.

Skills range from 1-9 and the skill list has been greatly reduced in number from previous editions. For example, rather than having separate skills for each different type of gun (pistol, SMG, assault rifle, sniper rifle, etc.) or different type of melee weapon (edged, bludgeoning, unarmed), there are just two skills: Firearms and Close Quarters. It also seems as though some other skills have been combined, as Con seems to have replaced a lot of the social-related skills. The pregens start with between five and nine different skills and none of them start with a rating higher than 6. There are also 2-3 knowledge skills for each character, but that’s not really pointed out anywhere in the Quick Start rules so it’s mostly just for background in this. The same goes for Qualities (positive and negative options for characters similar to feats or advantages/disadvantages), which are only mentioned in the Quick Start for their background value with no mechanics attached (though it appears they’re calculated into skill and attribute values).

Task resolution is handled by a D6 Dice Pool system. You roll a number of six-sided dice equal to a Skill and its linked Attribute (Agility + Firearms to attack, Magic + Sorcery to cast spells, etc.) Every 5 or 6 is considered a Hit, and to succeed you need to get more hits than the Threshold for the task or, if it’s opposed, more hits than the other character. Also, if at least half of the dice on any roll are a 1, you have rolled a Glitch which is a setback of some sort (this can happen whether or not you succeed on the test). Dice pools can be modified with more or fewer dice depending on circumstances, but it’s far less frequent than other editions thanks to the Edge System.

This is the biggest change in Sixth Edition. During each encounter (whether it’s a combat encounter or just trying to con your way past a guard), you have access to your Edge Pool. At the start of a session, your Edge Pool is equal to your Edge Attribute. The start of each action, you may have a chance to gain more Edge depending on circumstances, like a tactical advantage in a fight or a piece of gear. You can spend Edge once per action for some sort of advantage, and different advantages cost more edge. Some Edge effects can only be chosen before you roll and some only after, with each one clearly marked on the chart in the rules. This isn’t the full list, but it will give you an idea the sort of things you can do with Edge:

For one Edge, you can re-roll one die. For two, you can give an ally +1 Edge or negate 1 Edge of a foe. For three, you can buy an automatic hit on a test. For four, you can add your Edge Attribute in dice to the roll, re-roll all failed dice, or heal a point of damage. For five edge, you can force the target to count 1s and 2s toward determining if they’ve rolled a Glitch. You can spend more than 1 Edge on a single advantage (for example, spend three Edge to re-roll three dice), but you can only spend Edge once per action.

Your Edge Pool has a maximum cap of 7, and odds are you’re going to be getting at least one or two Edge points every round, so the system encourages you to spend Edge a lot. After the encounter is over, you can only keep a maximum amount of Edge equal to your Edge Attribute and anything more is lost. However, you don’t get extra edge back if you’ve got less than your Edge Attribute. I think my only issue with this system is the three different terms all with the word “Edge” that gets a bit confusing (Edge Attribute, Edge Pool, and Point of Edge), but the system does work rather well once you sort out which one is which.

Combat flows a lot faster than previous editions due to the new action economy. Initiative is rolled once and then set, so you act in order one after the other similar to games like Dungeons & Dragons. Characters can take one Major and one Minor action on their turn, plus an additional Minor action based on their Initiative stat (which means every character is going to have at least two Minor actions, but ones with big speed-boosting cyberware or magic effects may get three or four). Movement is simpler as well, as you just spend a Minor action to move and you move 10m, though there’s also a sprint option if you need to move more than that. You can also trade four Minor actions for one Major action, so especially speed-focused characters may get to attack twice in a single round. Oh, and initiative may be set but you can still shift around within order. One way to do so is to spend one Edge to add three to your Initiative score (which you can do multiple times with the same action).

Attacks are simple. First, you determine who (if anyone) gets any Edge. Step one is to compare the attackers Attack Value (determined by weapon and range) and the defender’s Defense Value (determined by armor). If the attacker’s AV is four or more, they get 1 Edge. Next is to look for situational modifiers (like a melee attacker having the high ground, or an attacker having low-light vision in a dark room when the target does not) which gets another Edge. Finally, you check if any gear gives Edge to one side or the other.

Next, you roll the attack, which for guns is Agility + Firearms versus Reaction + Intuition. If the defender gets more hits, the attack misses. If the attacker gets more or they tie, the attack hits. Each success the attacker rolled more than the defender adds +1 damage to the base damage of the weapon. Finally, the defender attempts to soak the damage. They roll their Body score and each hit cancels out one damage. Remember that Edge can only be used once per action, so the defender has to pick whether they want to use Edge on the dodge attempt or on the soak roll since they can’t do both.

Okay, so three dice rolls to figure out if an attack hit may seem like a lot to players used to other systems, but this is a great streamlining compared to other editions of Shadowrun, where so much time was spent calculating a lot of “+1 for this and -2 for that and +2 for this and -1 for that” for both sides in each attack.

The Magic system has been streamlined as well, with the number of skills required going way down from previous editions and your Magic attribute is more important than it has been for a while. The main limiting factor on magic is still drain, which is stun damage taken due to the exhaustion of channeling the mana to work magic. Spellcasting is broken into three stages, Adjust the Spell (which allows for increased damage or effects at the cost of more drain), Roll Magic + Sorcery to see if the spell works, and Soak Drain. The drain level varies by the spell and, with combat spells, you can increase the damage by +1 for every +2 drain. You soak drain by rolling a dice pool of your Magic attribute and another attribute based on your tradition (a mage uses Logic and a shaman uses Charisma), with each hit reducing drain by one.

Decking is…you know, I’ve never had a problem with the decking system in any edition of Shadowrun so I’ve never felt it was nearly as complicated as everyone thinks it is. But if you thought the system was complicated before, it’s incredibly easy now. I’d say it’s too simple for my personal taste, but this is the quick start rules and it implies that there are more options to add depth if you want in the core rules. There are only 12 different actions you can take in the Matrix, seven of them classified as Illegal actions and five Legal actions. If you’re trying to do something legal, it’s Electronics + Logic. If it’s illegal, it’s Cracking + Logic. All tests are opposed by the system, typically by the device or host’s Firewall score (though it varies depending on the action). Each hit a system makes defending against an Illegal action is counted up as your Overwatch Score (basically the Matrix’s built-in security noticing your illegal actions). Once your Overwatch Score hits 40, you’re immediately kicked out of the Matrix, your deck is destroyed, and your physical location reported to the authorities. Thankfully, you can reset your score simply by logging out for a bit before logging back in again, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

So that’s the rules…what about the included adventure “Battle Royale”? This is hands down the weakest part of the entire boxed set in my opinion. The plot of the adventure is a take on the classic starting adventure “Food Fight” from Shadowrun 1st Edition. That adventure was “The party is in a convenience store. A gang comes in to rob it. Fight.” This one adds layers of complexity that’s a bit much for an introductory adventure and it requires a bit of lore knowledge to understand a lot of it.

The basic plot for Battle Royale is that the party is in a convenience store when they notice a bunch of gangs in the alley outside surrounding a limo. Four different gangs, many of them rivals. There’s also a political element with the occupant of the limo that requires a knowledge of the current metaplot of Shadowrun to really understand what’s happening. I am being a bit vague to avoid spoilers as what the gangs are doing and their motivations are come right at the start of the adventure for the gamemaster, but the players won’t know. Either way, the adventure hinges on the players sticking their nose into what looks like a volatile situation with no guaranteed payout and, in a morally-ambiguous setting like Shadowrun, they’re just likely to just mind their own business unless directly provoked.

The adventure itself isn’t badly written. The layout is good and easy to follow, the writing is solid, the directions clear. If this adventure were on its own, I wouldn’t have any problems with it. But as the introductory adventure to Shadowrun, I don’t think it works because the setup doesn’t feel very Shadowrun. There’s no meet with a Johnson to get hired for a run, no planning, no paranoia or betrayal, none of the hallmarks of what make Shadowrun’s core game premise what it is. They just took the concept of “Food Fight” (which was less an adventure and more just a quick scenario to demo the combat rules) and expanded on it rather than create something that worked as an introduction.

Thankfully, there’s a lot of NPCs included with the adventure (and as cards as part of the included reference deck) so you could easily craft a scenario that’s far more Shadowrun for your group or grab an introductory adventure from a previous edition and swap in the new NPCs. It wouldn’t be hard to use the materials presented to throw together a “Corporate executive kidnapped by gang, go rescue them” run that’s more fitting. Or you could just run the old Food Fight by just grabbing a half dozen of the gang NPCs and putting them in the store. The old mess table is in “Battle Royale” for missed shots so you can randomly decide what sort of item exploded off the shelf (“The bullet misses you and hits a jar behind you that covers you in *roll* red *roll* chunky *roll* meat!”), so you can still have fun.

The four pre-generated player characters are interesting, making a good mix but also having a lot of room to grow. There’s Frostburn, the Ork Combat Mage; Yu, the Elf Covert Ops Specialist/Face; Rude, the Troll Street Samurai (who actually doesn’t have much cyberware); and Zipfile, the Dwarf Decker. While I haven’t seen the character generation rules yet, none of the characters seem to suffer from the terrible unoptimized builds of other editions, so they’re actually playable as they are without tweaking. Each character has a single-page character sheet with all the info you need to run them. Yes, the character sheets are one page. Yes, for all the characters. That’s how streamlined the game’s gotten.

The character sheet itself is in the middle of a two-page spread, though, with sidebars explaining what everything on the sheet is so it’s easier to find what you need. Personally, I’d recommend copying the character sheet over to another page so you can write stuff down easily and just use the dossier’s sheet as a reference if you need it. The rest of the booklets are taken up with backstories for each character, roleplaying tips, some examples of how the character fits into a Shadowrun adventure (like what they do when meeting with a Johnson to get hired for a run), and tables customized for that specific character (so Zipfile has info on hacking while Frostburn has magic tables).

Overall, the Shadowrun Sixth World Beginner Box works as a good introduction to the new rules both for new players and veterans wondering what’s changed. It’s also the perfect tease for the full core rulebook due out this August as it hints at a lot of rules systems that the Quickstart doesn’t cover (and not just character generation). It’s not going to have a lot of longevity, though, since there are no character advancement options, no gear aside from what the PCs start with and the NPCs have, and only the one adventure. But I still think that the components like the poster map of Seattle and the dice on their own are worth the money for veteran players and the $24.99 price for everything you need to play makes it a good sweet spot for those curious about Shadowrun and want to know if the new edition works for them but who aren’t ready to dive into the full game. Speaking of, the Shadowrun Sixth World Core Rulebook is due out this August with a retail price of $49.99.

Thanks for the review! I have to say that the combat system does indeed sound less stream-lined than I would wish and I am also not 100% sure if I like everything being funnelled into Edge (that will depend mostly on how you gain Edge), but it still seems like a move into the right direction.

Thanks for the review! I have to say that the combat system does indeed sound less stream-lined than I would wish and I am also not 100% sure if I like everything being funnelled into Edge (that will depend mostly on how you gain Edge), but it still seems like a move into the right direction.

In combat, the first step of every attack is determining who gets edge. That goes in three steps.

1) Compare Attack Value versus Defense Value. If the AV is 4 or more higher, the attacker gets 1 edge. Since your AV is determined by your weapon and your range, this will lead to you wanting to get in position as an attacker (some weapons do better at Near range than at Close or Medium). It's all listed on the gear card for each weapon so it's easy to reference.

2) Compare situations. If one side as a distinct advantage over the other, they get an Edge. I have low-light or thermographic vision in a dark room and you have neither, I get an edge. Or we're in a mall and I've got my AR turned on but yours is turned off, you get an Edge because I'm distracted by all the pop-up ads trying to get me to buy the New Nerps Cherry (with 75% more nutrition!) and can't see straight. Basically, this is where the tactical stuff comes in as you'll be jockeying each turn to make sure you've got this advantage.

3) If you have gear that gives you a point of Edge under a certain circumstance, you get one. None of the gear in the Quickstart has this, so it's hard to say what that means exactly.

The idea is to get the players constantly thinking about where they are in combat and what the situation is and having them adjust to always have the upper hand so they're always getting 2-3 Edge per turn, and also spending that edge every turn or two because you can't really stockpile it - the cap is 7 and you lose anything over your Edge attribute that you don't spend at the end of the encounter.

It takes a bit to get used to (which is why I recommend a straight-up Food Fight run to get the hang of it before adding on anything more serious than "these gangers picked the wrong convenience store to rob" to the mix), but once you've got your head around how it works and what you can do with it, it opens up a lot of tactics and gets the players doing more than just standing in one spot firing at the baddies every round.

Example of an attack in SR4:
Storyteller: "You get +2 on the attack" -> 3 Rolls. Finish.

Example of an attack in SR6:
Storyteller: "What is the score of your weapon?" Player: "It is 6." Storyteller: I have an armor of 5, so you get 1 edge." Player: "And the situation modifier?" Storyteller: "You also will get 1 Edge." Player: "What are my options with edge again?" Storyteller: "I will explain it to you, but first we make a little break."

In SR5 they told us, that there are limits that make the game easier, faster and streamlinend. No they have a new system.

The old Shadowrun was a hard bad world and you looked for all advantages you could get. So you tried to play intelligent. Now you cant get many advantages. It doesnt matter, how many good ideas you have. You will just get 1 edge for all the good ideas. It is not important how good they are.

Example of an attack in SR4:
Storyteller: "You get +2 on the attack" -> 3 Rolls. Finish.

You played a very different version of 4e than I did, and I've played both the original and the 20th Anniversary edition. It was more like:

"Okay, so you get +2 for the cyberlink and +1 for low light vision but -1 for the smoke and -2 for range and -1 for recoil (or was it -2, what's your recoil compensation again? oh right) and -1 because the target moved and -2 because you ran and -1 because they have some cover and-- Wait, what was that weird quality you took from that PDF-only sourcebook again?" "I lost count, can we start over?"

I edited a SR 4e podcast, I know exactly how much mathematical mess I had to cut out of every episode to keep the action flowing. A 30-40 minute combat encounter would get edited down to 10-15 minutes after I cut all the calculating modifiers to dice pool out. This is WAY faster.

In combat, the first step of every attack is determining who gets edge. That goes in three steps.
...
It takes a bit to get used to (which is why I recommend a straight-up Food Fight run to get the hang of it before adding on anything more serious than "these gangers picked the wrong convenience store to rob" to the mix), but once you've got your head around how it works and what you can do with it, it opens up a lot of tactics and gets the players doing more than just standing in one spot firing at the baddies every round.

I might get used to it - it's just that other games that I play (D&D, PbtA, Warhammer Fantasy) have a much simpler process to resolve combat actions. Also I feel things were simpler when I still played Shadowrun regularly (1e/2e times), but my memory is a bit blurry here, so I might be wrong. So it boils down to me being unsure if the process adds enough value to justify the multiple steps it requires, but that's of course quite subjective.

I might get used to it - it's just that other games that I play (D&D, PbtA, Warhammer Fantasy) have a much simpler process to resolve combat actions. Also I feel things were simpler when I still played Shadowrun regularly (1e/2e times), but my memory is a bit blurry here, so I might be wrong. So it boils down to me being unsure if the process adds enough value to justify the multiple steps it requires, but that's of course quite subjective.

1e/2e/3e was when I was really, really into Shadowrun and 3rd Ed is still my favorite edition of the game out of 1st through 5th...but it was way more complicated then.

This is the 3rd Edition (which is simpler than 2nd Ed which was simpler than 1st Ed) combat steps:

Step One: Determine Range (the range increments were different for every single weapon rather than universal, and there was a big chart you had to reference if you didn't write it on your character sheet).

Step Two: Apply situational Target Modifiers (because in SR1-3, the target number changed as well as your dice pool, so some things would make the target number +1 or -1 while others would add or subtract a die).

Step Three: Make the Attack (and the attacker decides if they want to add any of their Combat Pool dice to the roll before making it).

Step Four: The target makes a Dodge Roll using just Combat Pool dice against a TN 4 (with modifiers). The attack is dodged if the target gets more successes.

Step Five: Now the target makes a Damage Resistance test of Body plus any Combat Pool dice against a target number of the weapon's Power versus the target's Armor.

Step Six: Compare the Dodge AND the Damage Resistance test to the Attacker's successes. Whoever has more successes gets to stage the damage. Every two successes moves the damage up or down one step from Light, Moderate, Severe, or Deadly.

Step Seven: Take Damage.

Oh, and SR1 was worse because it had variable staging numbers. That's why the damage code was like 4L1 or 5M3, the first number was the weapon's Power and the second number the Staging Number which was how many successes it took to stage the damage up or down a level.

Also the "situational modifiers" was a massive chart of who moved how much, visibility, concealment, cover, gear, spells, and more.

It was satisfying, but incredibly crunchy and combat could take ages if you didn't know what you were doing.

Thank you for the review! SR3 was basically my first foray into a non-D&D game, and it's been a favorite of mine ever since. One my best friends -- who is the GM when we play SR -- is looking forward to the release of the Beginner Box. We really liked what 5e did, but with the way the new Edge system seems to encourage paying attention to what's going on, I am hopeful that this helps reduce player disconnect during more involved battles.

As for it being overly complex, I'm reminded of when I introduced The Dark Eye RPG to my friends. Several weren't fans of rolling three dice and checking against attributes, using the rating of the skill to buy successes if one of the dice failed on the roll. To them, it was going to increase the time spent doing something that D&D managed with a single roll. While not perfectly analogous to Shadowrun 6e's Edge system, I think the end result will be similar: as one becomes more familiar with the system, it becomes second nature, ultimately speeding up combat, as Catalyst suggest. The players, in turn, will also have their favorite Edges to use, so there won't be as much flipping through the lists as time goes on, either.

1e/2e/3e was when I was really, really into Shadowrun and 3rd Ed is still my favorite edition of the game out of 1st through 5th...but it was way more complicated then.

This is the 3rd Edition (which is simpler than 2nd Ed which was simpler than 1st Ed) combat steps:
...
It was satisfying, but incredibly crunchy and combat could take ages if you didn't know what you were doing.

Thanks! It seems, earlier editions were not so simple as they seemed through my rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, then

I will still say that my optimal combat task resolution mechanism is probably more like:

Set situation modifier/dice added or substracted - by GM judgement, ideally supported by guidelines in the rule book

Use armour to reduce damage, possibly including armour durability (fixed or some sort of roll)

Edge (or more generally: a meta resource) can be spend to in any step to bend fate in favour of the side who spends it.

However, I prefer a rather narrative game and I can see why people would be uncomfortable with the amount of GM fiat involved here. Also, it probably does not meet the crunch demand of a significant portion of the player base.

I still look forward to your review of the full rule book and rest of the starting line up of SR6, though (this article was a very good one).

As for it being overly complex, I'm reminded of when I introduced The Dark Eye RPG to my friends. Several weren't fans of rolling three dice and checking against attributes, using the rating of the skill to buy successes if one of the dice failed on the roll. To them, it was going to increase the time spent doing something that D&D managed with a single roll. While not perfectly analogous to Shadowrun 6e's Edge system, I think the end result will be similar: as one becomes more familiar with the system, it becomes second nature, ultimately speeding up combat, as Catalyst suggest. The players, in turn, will also have their favorite Edges to use, so there won't be as much flipping through the lists as time goes on, either.

As a German I should probably not say that, but I think The Dark Eye's 3d20 check is an abomination that should be cast back to the abyss out of which it crawled

While not perfectly analogous to Shadowrun 6e's Edge system, I think the end result will be similar: as one becomes more familiar with the system, it becomes second nature, ultimately speeding up combat, as Catalyst suggest. The players, in turn, will also have their favorite Edges to use, so there won't be as much flipping through the lists as time goes on, either.

I don't think I made this clear, but that pretty much IS the Edge list. It's one page with descriptions of each option and I only left a couple off (mostly ones that tied to other mechanics and I didn't want to get tangled explaining too much all at once). There may be more options in the full core rules, but according to Jason Hardy, it's still a single page in the core rules. It's the fine line of trying to give enough choices to be interesting but not so many that it creates analysis paralysis. Particularly where that's possible to come up with the action economy (as players are probably going to want to use every single action they can even if they don't need to, and there's only so many choices for minor actions).

As a German I should probably not say that, but I think The Dark Eye's 3d20 check is an abomination that should be cast back to the abyss out of which it crawled

Karl Kombatmage "Das ist umglaublich!"

@Abstruse It appears that the karma pool of 3e which was replaced by edge is now a smaller edge pool, yes?

I wonder if 6e will help improve the character composition I find. It is tiresome for me to have the majority of players creating magician adepts in a world where magic is supposedly rare. "less than one percent of the population and only one of ten of those persons being trained". With the next group being cyber monsters with one or less essence.

Was anything mentioned about the security zones? This is something I wish would be more enforced in game with mechanics. Carrying an assault rifle in AAA downtown should be verboten. Trying to conceal said assault rifle underneath your second skin armor should be a joke regardless of how much edge one might spend to do so.

I don't think I made this clear, but that pretty much IS the Edge list. It's one page with descriptions of each option and I only left a couple off (mostly ones that tied to other mechanics and I didn't want to get tangled explaining too much all at once). There may be more options in the full core rules, but according to Jason Hardy, it's still a single page in the core rules. It's the fine line of trying to give enough choices to be interesting but not so many that it creates analysis paralysis. Particularly where that's possible to come up with the action economy (as players are probably going to want to use every single action they can even if they don't need to, and there's only so many choices for minor actions).

Fair enough. I don't think *I* made myself clear enough when I commented. I was thinking in terms of the core rulebook and "on down the line", but it's clear that you can't read my mind. Thanks for elaborating, though. I'd like to see a few more options (maybe 1-2 for each point total), but I agree that too many and it will bog things down.

I'm going to review it just for my YouTube channel, but one of the first 6e sourcebook is the media sourcebook No Future, and Karl Kombatmage gets a nice feature in it.

@Abstruse It appears that the karma pool of 3e which was replaced by edge is now a smaller edge pool, yes?

Ehhh...not really, but the distinction requires history of the system. The Karma Pool in 3e was meant to be a very small resource that grew as you gained experience (one tenth of all the Karma (aka XP) you received went to upgrading your Karma Pool) and gave you special advantages like re-rolls, extra dice, stuff like that. It was carried over with modifications from 1e and 2e. It evolved drastically for 4e into Edge and became a more important tool as it became its own special attribute, the pool was larger, and it refreshed more often. Plus it replaced the various task-oriented dice pools like Combat Pool, Hacking Pool, Control Pool, etc. In 5e it became absolutely critical as the only way around Limits was to spend Edge on a roll (thus the "Be Awesome Tax"). It's just another step in the evolution.

I wonder if 6e will help improve the character composition I find. It is tiresome for me to have the majority of players creating magician adepts in a world where magic is supposedly rare. "less than one percent of the population and only one of ten of those persons being trained". With the next group being cyber monsters with one or less essence.

Was anything mentioned about the security zones? This is something I wish would be more enforced in game with mechanics. Carrying an assault rifle in AAA downtown should be verboten. Trying to conceal said assault rifle underneath your second skin armor should be a joke regardless of how much edge one might spend to do so.

I don't know a lot about character creation because it's not part of the Quickstart, but a bit of information came out through Shadowcasters Network and their Q&As as well as their interview with line developer Jason Hardy. I personally never had a problem with a shadowrunner team being filled with rare metavariants and magicians even though they're supposed to be rare because...well, shadowrunners are supposed to be rare and they're supposed to be the outcasts of society who can't earn a regular living or who want freedom from the corporate machine. So it makes sense that you're going to run into more mages and technomancers in the shadows.

And I know nothing about the security zones. They're not mentioned in the quickstart and, as far as I'm aware, haven't come up on any of the interviews or Q&As yet. Really though, the rules have always been there, it's just been a matter of GMs not really enforcing it. The players are going to try to sneak their two meter long Panther assault cannon into the middle of a downtown bank no matter what, and adding in the fight with the police trying to stop them just derails the actual adventure and turns it into tabletop GTA, so a lot of GMs just let the players get away with it to save the hassle.

Fair enough. I don't think *I* made myself clear enough when I commented. I was thinking in terms of the core rulebook and "on down the line", but it's clear that you can't read my mind. Thanks for elaborating, though. I'd like to see a few more options (maybe 1-2 for each point total), but I agree that too many and it will bog things down.

I think if we see any others added, it'll be more narrow-focused to a specific build type. Like you can only use this Edge Boost when decking or when astral projecting or whatever. Or it might be the function of certain types of cyberware, like the tactical subprocessor giving you the ability to spend edge on an ally's roll or something like that. It would add more complexity and variety to the system, but still be optional. Don't want the extra options bogging things down, don't get that cyberware or that adept power.

I think if we see any others added, it'll be more narrow-focused to a specific build type. Like you can only use this Edge Boost when decking or when astral projecting or whatever. Or it might be the function of certain types of cyberware, like the tactical subprocessor giving you the ability to spend edge on an ally's roll or something like that. It would add more complexity and variety to the system, but still be optional. Don't want the extra options bogging things down, don't get that cyberware or that adept power.

Yeah, adding ways to spend Edge via optional abilities (Qualities, cyber-/bioware, adept powers, whatever) is a nice way to make Edge more useful without increasing the cognitive load too much.

@Abstruse I am guessing that this might happen; from what you have seen in the character dossiers would it appear that concentrations and specializations will be in place for extra edge? For example: firearms, pistols, ares predator 5

Reviews

Wizards of the Coast is promoting Ghosts of Saltmarsh as an adventure book with a setting and rule supplements so since I already did a spoiler-free review of the book overall, let's take a closer look at the adventures it contains. While I avoid significant spoilers, be aware that broad information about each adventure is mentioned.

The Shadowrun Sixth World Beginner Box due for release at Origins this June will be our first look at the new edition of the now 30-year-old Shadowrun game system. This new edition promises to be a more streamlined experience for new players while still satisfying veterans, but does it live up to that promise?

Ghosts of Saltmarsh will make Greyhawk fans happy without losing newer D&D 5th Edition players. Billed as a supplement for nautical adventures, it's a mix of new rules for ships and sea travel, adventures and supplemental material for any coastal campaign.

Sequels can be a tricky thing to handle, especially when they promise a darker, edgier tone. Despite its much gloomier tone, however, Things from the Flood manages to avoid difficult-second-album syndrome with a game that neatly blends weird sci-fi mysteries and teenage drama, though sometimes it’s hard to tell which aspect is the most dangerous and unsettling.

Gangs kill and terrorize Victory City overwhelming law and order. Super villains run amok. Become a vigilante and strike back using violence to fight violence in the dark setting nicknamed Vigilante City.